- Ordinary Human Love, by Melissa Goode. Ultimo, $34.99
The late American writer, Joan Didion, said she wrote to find out what she thought, what she wanted and what she feared. For me, writing provides the same clarity, and has become a means for working through universal experiences, such as love and grief.
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The processes of writing and reading are often thought of as creating an exchange between the writer and reader. No matter whether what is on the page is familiar to the reader, there is hopefully a connection forged between the writer and reader.
Writing is an exercise in empathy, viewing the world through other eyes. And reading requires the same of the reader.
Writers have often turned to non-fiction to process the events in their lives. Helen Garner's series of diaries from 1978 to 1998, recount a life of love and work which were arduous and tumultuous. Garner allows such scrutiny of herself, but by doing so, she allows us insight into our own lives, and their trajectories. Her experiences resonate whether or not we have experienced anything similar, because the entire work is embedded in her emotional being. This is what makes it sing.
Similarly, Joan Didion, in her book The Year of Magical Thinking, wrote about the death of her husband, writer John Dunne: "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it." For me, Didion's book was the clearest expression of dealing with the death of a spouse, and to find a kindred soul in a book, to find understanding and compassion, was salvation.
Writers and artists throughout history have worked through their life on the page, or canvas. Whether it be express in non-fiction works, or more elusive, through fiction or visual art.
Famously, Vincent Van Gogh's works were produced under the most difficult circumstances. Arguably his most celebrated work, The Starry Night, dated 1889, was painted after he had committed himself to Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, an asylum, just north of Arles, a year before he took his life. The swirls of glowing stars above a dark town point to his struggle to overcome. We can be mesmerised and in awe of the painting, whether or not we know how it came to be, because we find our own meanings, relative to our own lives.
The novel I have written, Ordinary Human Love, is fundamentally a love story. To me, writing about love is to write about a force that is at once elusive and primal, for when it happens there is nothing that can be done to stop it. In my novel, Mardi has fallen in love with Ian and is unable to extricate herself, no matter what anyone says. And no matter what society says, given Ian and Mardi come from such different backgrounds, and that when Mardi first fell for Ian, she was still married.
The novel focuses on love in its ascendancy, more so than the other side of the love equation, grief. But both love/grief, elation/torture, the whole equation is there.
This whole love is what I look for in the books I read. And I find it in those fictional worlds with rich, highly developed characters, shaped by life experiences, and inhabiting emotional spaces that are wholly immersive for the reader. Here, I am thinking of the writers I keep returning to, such as Marilynne Robinson (and the Gilead and Home universe she created in small-town Iowa in 1956 with Reverend John Ames and the Boughton siblings, Jack and Glory), Elizabeth Strout (and her radically different characters, Olive Kitteridge, and more recently, Lucy Barton), Bernadine Evaristo (whose series of women in Girl, Woman, Other captured each woman in her own time), Anne Enright (who creates ensembles of dynamic characters anew, such as in The Gathering, The Forgotten Waltz and currently, The Wren, The Wren), and John Banville (and his multifaceted characters in all his novels, including The Sea, and his recent Quirke series about a cantankerous, but emotionally astute, pathologist in 1950's Dublin).
Fortunately, reading is there, even when writing eludes me. And for the story to be a salve, it must be full of compassion, with characters who I understand, the writer having drawn them so that I feel the character's inner life, their motivations, and the context in which they make decisions and act.
Some books I have read have not come close to helping me and left me feeling empty. I think this is because they are clever, remote, and bounce me out of the story, when all I want is a connection, the sense of not being alone. It takes the right book to achieve that, to make the reader lose their sense of time, their own worldly pain, and find respite in another place. To me, this comes down to the writer and how much they have bled on the page (to paraphrase Hemingway: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."). When I write, I want the reader to feel subsumed: to be held in a story, to not even see the book in our hands.
